Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley (1811-1872), influential American journalist and political leader, noted for his vigorous espousal of the antislavery cause in the period preceding the American Civil War. He was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, on February 3, 1811. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a printer in East Poultney, Vermont, and four years later became an itinerant journeyman printer.

In 1831 Greeley settled in New York City, where he became editor successively of the New Yorker, the Jeffersonian, and the Log Cabin, rapidly gaining a reputation as an influential political writer. He also became associated with the Whig leaders Governor William Seward of New York and the journalist Thurlow Weed, with whom he worked in behalf of progressive governmental policies.

In order to serve the Whig cause with a low-priced newspaper that would avoid the sensationalism of the New York Herald and the academic detachment of the New York Evening Post, Greeley in 1841 founded the New York Tribune. It met with immediate success, and Greeley remained its editor for 31 years. During this period he opposed unequal distribution of wealth, denounced monopoly, and attacked the preemption of public lands by the railroads and speculators. He advocated a protective tariff, the development of agriculture, and migration to the West; his advice to a Congregational clergyman, who had lost his voice and had to leave the ministry, to build his future in the West, widely popularized the phrase of the Indiana newspaperman John Soule, “Go west, young man.” For a time Greeley was sympathetic to the ideas of such utopian socialists as the French philosopher François Marie Charles Fourier and the British social reformer Robert Owen and to those of the English Chartists. For several years, Greeley employed Karl Marx as a European correspondent, publishing dispatches that later became famous as classics of Marxian socialism.

Although opposed to the abolitionists, who denounced him as a conservative, Greeley was unequivocally opposed to slavery. He opposed the Mexican War because he saw it as a plot conceived by slave owners, and, for the same reason, he urged rejection of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. His increasing preoccupation with these issues led him, in 1854, to break with Seward and Weed.

In 1856, and again in 1860, Greeley attended the national conventions of the Republican Party; in the latter year, he was influential in bringing about the nomination of Abraham Lincoln for president. Believing at first that the South should be allowed to secede if a majority of its inhabitants voted to do so, Greeley later urged that the southern states be compelled by force to abide by the decision of the national electorate and its government under Lincoln. He urged vigorous prosecution of the Civil War and frequently criticized Lincoln's hesitation to free the slaves.

After the war, Greeley urged a general amnesty, thus antagonizing the Republican Party; and his proposal of unrestricted universal suffrage to form a basis of reconstruction in the South pleased neither side. Greeley provoked great anger in the North and alienated many erstwhile admirers when he signed a bail bond for Jefferson Davis, leader of the defeated Confederacy, whose long imprisonment he held to be a violation of constitutional rights.

Later holding that the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant was corrupt, Greeley, in 1872, accepted the nomination for president by the dissident Liberal Republican Party. He was subsequently endorsed by the Democrats but was defeated by Grant in the election. Thereafter his health failed and he took little part in the Tribune editorship. He died in New York City on November 29, 1872.

Greeley's published works are chiefly collections of his editorials, speeches, and lectures. They include Hints Toward Reforms (1850), A History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension or Restriction (1856), An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (1860), The American Conflict (2 volumes, 1864-1866), and Recollections of a Busy Life (autobiography, 1868).